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'Game changer' Obama puts pressure on Harper

It's no small thing to have a black man in the White House 40 years after Martin Luther King's assassination.

(PAUL LACHINE / NEWSART)

By James Travers

Tues., Jan. 20, 2009

OTTAWA – Savour this moment. It's no small thing to have a black man in the White House 40 years after Martin Luther King's assassination or for there to be a whiff of hope in the air a few months after the U.S. financial superstructure crashed with the suddenness of a pyramid scheme.

Savour Barack Obama's inauguration, too, because history is restless. Come tomorrow it will move on, carrying Canada with it in the backwash of a new president with the audacity to raise expectations to the breaking point.

For the U.S., this is a chance to embrace a superior future by returning to the sound foundations of an aspirational nation. For Canada, it's an opportunity to recalibrate an asymmetrical relationship that, for better and worse, sustains and defines.

Even in its euphoria, America is sobered by the dimensions of what's ahead. Bringing back order to the economy, troops from Iraq and respect for justice to the presidency are challenges to test any president's wisdom and any generation's will.

Canadians share their neighbours' mixed emotions. Joy at the triumph over prejudice and relief at seeing the toxic back of George W. Bush coexist with recognition of the hugeness of the U.S. task and the slowly dawning realization that the Obama phenomenon brings to this country the qualified blessing of closer self-examination.

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It's tempting to see the best of ourselves in the politics of the man who is to become the 44th president today. He personifies inclusivity at home, multilateralism abroad and an American renaissance of high intellect over base instinct.

Uplifting as that is for the majority of Canadians who say they would have cast ballots for Obama if they only could, those values are not trend points on this country's current trajectory. Canada's politics are as listless as they are polarized – more voters stayed home in the last election than supported the victorious Conservative minority.

Ottawa's equivocal support for global solutions to global problems, most notably climate change, stripped gloss from a once shining international reputation. Success for this government is reinforcing, not challenging, the coffee-and-cruller consensus.

Differences are always important to Canadians nurturing identity in the shadow of an economic, military and cultural colossus. But while some are easily adjusted, others come packaged with internal as well as external tensions and contradictions.

Those stresses are most evident in what matters most on both sides of the border – prosperity. Job One is jobs and the Prime Minister's priority is to convince a new, more protectionist president and Congress that the surest way forward is to maximize the inherent, far from fully realized, advantages of a shared continental economic space.

That won't be easy. Even if Obama's NAFTA campaign concerns prove largely rhetorical in office, the president's performance will be measured against his commitment to keep employment at home. That puts the onus on Canada, and intense pressure on Stephen Harper, to build a compelling case that North America is most competitive when it's most cohesive.

Obama's decision to make Ottawa his first foreign destination is the opening Harper needs to present this country as an essential business partner as well as a trusted friend. Along with reminding that Canada is the U.S. energy pump, expect the Prime Minister to make the point that the two countries have evolved beyond trading with each other to manufacturing together.

Strong as those selling points are, the potential deal-breaker is the compromises necessary to move from integration to trading bloc. To thin a post-9/11 border thickened by parochial interests as well as security fears, Ottawa would have to play even more by Washington rules. Small yet symbolic regulatory idiosyncrasies would evaporate even as a common approach to safeguarding the continental perimeter emerges.

Obama's swollen popularity should at least slow Canada's reflex rejection of anything seen to erode sovereignty. But what would be a charged and lengthy national debate has yet to spread beyond this country's political, business and academic elites, nor is eventual concurrence a certainty.

It's a stretch to think a country that can't agree on the common sense of a single stock market watchdog could easily accept made-in-U.S. regulations or, just for example, extend its Afghanistan mission as proof of its commitment to American security. Yet those accommodations would be part of the price Ottawa could reasonably expect to pay for sure access to American markets and an agreement to move beyond, not back from, NAFTA.

Still, if raising the relationship is difficult, maintaining the status quo is improbable. Obama is what is known in sport and politics as a game changer. It would be as foolish for Canada to ignore what his holistic economic, environment and energy plans mean for this country as it would be for Harper not to notice that Obama is practising the flip side of the same Republican strategy Mike Harris imported and brought Conservatives to power.

Political pendulums swing and it's far from clear how well the Obama dream will fare against the nightmare of current realities. As much as his personal success promises an era of enlightenment, the failure of his presidency could accelerate a return to populism, or worse.

Whatever is over the horizon, this remains a day to cup in memory's palm. In proving that anything is possible in America, Obama is holding a mirror to the world. Canada should not look away.

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